The Diamond Island

The Ghostly Fire of Her Raiment compels me to behold and honor subterranean majesty. There are creatures stirring in the deep crevices of inner space who will be recognized.

The Surface Swell of A Bright Green Tail ripples through my thoughts, stirring up feelings of wonder and excitement. Within a lost lake is a vital spirit beyond explanation.

The Whisper of Nameless Chill At The Door clutches me with anxiety and I shrink back. The daylight cries of the sorrowful evoke compassion from me with dire need.

All about me is mystery, secrets, the buried and forgotten. I’m going to start digging, and prying loose, and shining my unlight into the shrouds. No matter what snapping surprise, ghastly apparition or hostile grotesque comes spilling into view. See the space I have created, the circle I have drawn and stepped out of? Anything goes.

My aunt sent me a nice meditation on her use of calendars.  I found it a pleasant experience to contemplate the myriad ways in which calendars act as signposts and friends.  I asked her if would be okay if I posted to share with my visitors.  As a result, without further ado, here is some stuff:

Calendars

For many people a calendar is just a place to keep track of one’s appointments.  They use a software calendar which has the wonderful feature of reminding you in some predetermined time period that an event is coming.  Often this is useful to give you a heads up that some sort of preparation needs to be done.  A useful tool.  But for me calendars serve so many purposes and consequently more than one is needed.

There is the calendar in my bathroom.  No appointments here.  It is meant to both please me visually and give me a sense of the passage of time in a more general sense.  This calendar is the kind that is hung in a frame.  The display consists of homey paintings.  Geese floating on a pond in the foreground with a snow covered house and evergreens behind.  I stare at this with my glasses off while brushing my teeth at the start and the end of the day.  I eagerly anticipate taking the frame apart at the end of each month to uncover the image that will be contemplated in the next month.

And then there is the kitchen calendar.  At the beginning of each year, on January 1, I remove the previous year’s calendar and place it beside the new one.  This calendar sets a theme for the year and holds all the birthdays in the family.  I carefully go through each month and copy these birthdays into the new year pausing to think about each of these people and our connectedness.  Last year the pictures were paintings of summer homes with the appropriate season’s foliage and lighting.  This year it will be porches – each with attractive comfortable looking chairs, pleasant vistas and quotes from literature that help evoke the sense of time and place.

At work I need two more calendars – not counting the one in my email.  One is a simple spiral bound black calendar which displays a month at a time with the other months shown down the far right column.  This is where I write my work, tennis and healthcare appointments.  I can see the whole month laid out and can easily page forward or backward to compare, calculate or plan.  It also has, at the very front, the entire year spread out across two pages.  Here I track my vacation and sick time so that as I daydream about my next day off I know exactly how many days I’ve taken and how many days are piled up like gold waiting to be spent.  At the very end is another two page spread of the following year.  Very useful for checking which holidays fall on Mondays and Fridays to yield a long weekend.  It also shows me on what day of the week will my birthday fall that year.

The second work calendar has pictures and is pinned up on my cubicle wall.  No appointments are recorded here.  It’s sole purpose is to give me a sense of escape while I am chained to my rolling chair in front of my monitor.  If I were to decide in a moment of frugality to skip getting one of my other calendars, I would feel a sense of loss.  But it would be a feeling like when you forget to put on your watch and keep staring at the emptiness that should be your watch.

This calendar I could not do without.  While grinding away at some tedious project, I glance up and escape for a moment and return refreshed.  This is the calendar that requires the most careful research before it is selected.  I begin in October when the new calendars start to appear online.  During times of extreme stress or boredom I go online to check out the new calendars and the images that they offer.  I stare at them and see if they provide the right amount of escape, fantasy and visual stimulation.

Many times I have considered the ones from despair.com and these have great quality images and often evoke outright laughter but then I realize that staring at them everyday in this setting would eventually leave me feeling…despair.  So I move on and try pictures of foreign lands.  Their beautiful countrysides and sense of adventure are very tempting.  Often I choose one of these.  2008 was a calendar of Wales and another year was Provence.

Beach scenes are popular.  Especially during the long grey winter of the Midwest.  But they are too repetitive and leave one longing for a pina colada to break the repetition.  I have considered tennis calendars but they all focus on famous players and feel like a strange form of hero worship.

This year I have chosen another porch calendar.  Different from the one that will hang in the kitchen.  This one has scenes that are less perfect and leave you with the feeling that this could be your own porch or perhaps a friend’s porch.  And it appears that we have all headed into the house to grab a pitcher of lemonade or another glass of wine – and we will be right back, at any moment, to take up where we left off… laughing and talking… sitting on the porch…with all the time in the world.  I can hardly wait to get to work on Monday and pin it up in my cubicle.

Happy New Year!

Earlier, I mentioned that cleanliness is the secret weapon. Now is the time to avail myself of that superzapper to clear out the destructoids not taken out by the New Year reset button.

I wake up from a comfortable sleep full of dreams about Bigfoot studies and mountain retreats. I give myself a relaxed, easy shave and a nice hot shower. A fresh set of clean clothes and a dash of tropical rainforest aftershave to make me feel like a million bucks. My mindset is rooted deeply in the quiet, contemplative emptiness of a new day.

Next up comes a full and hearty brunch (my favorite meal of the day) for K and I. I cook up a helping of turkey bacon, fried eggs easy up with lots of pepper, hash brown patties (with an extra for K because she loves hash browns), and toast with butter and blackberry jam from K’s delicious homemade bread (she’s getting quite good with bread now, after having read Yakitate for inspiration).

Frankie comes by for a pet. She looks out the window and meows at me. I take her up in my arms and we have a walk around the neighborhood. She is well-behaved, paws calmly digging into my sweatshirt as we take in the cool air in the light of the bright sun. Then it’s back to finish up the cooking.

K and I have brunch and revel in the comfort and satisfaction of a shared meal together. The food tastes delicious. Frankie munches on her dried salmon treats, Blink washes herself in her lambskin and wooly tower, and michael the ratbag pigpen snowbeast sleeps at the top of the stairs on an empty laundry bag.

Next up: chores. K vacuums while I do dishes. Frankie comes by and watches me clean dishes in the sink, enthralled as always by the running water and the steam. She grows sleepy and climbs into her crow’s nest by the fridge, joining Blink and Michael in slumber.

I clean out the fridge, then get a pizza dough started for Pizza of Doom. I mix up some rum punch for a shin-dig with the parental units tomorrow (though there’s plenty for sampling later). The punch forms easily, the flavor masking the strong alcohol with just the right amount of flair.

K decides to join the cats and sleeps on the couch. I tuck her in with Jeero the ani-pal and she passes out. It’s a lazy day after all, and one needs one’s strength.

I put the last of the suitable holiday cookies and cakes out for the squirrels. They show up within minutes and clean out the lot – in a half hour there’s nothing left. Feeding the animals gives me a warm feeling.

While I wait for the dough to rise, I sit at my special spot next to the stairs and gather my materials. In particular I contemplate the photograph of a willow loaned to me by the Incorrigible Witch Hexe witchiepoo of the many ovens.

I go over in my mental containers the experience of her two collage booklets (a term which fails to do justice to what they actually are, but needs must make do when the Devil drives), and how they relate to something in my book. I never would have thought I’d encounter a living example of concepts I only imagined in my head.

Then there are the “last request” Koh-I-Noor woodless colour pencils she gave me. I examine my poster board sketches and imagine what the next step might be.

BAM!

Frankie has knocked the box of hot cocoa powder from the counter to the floor of the kitchen. I come over and pet her, giving her lavish and deep voiced praise. She settles down and cat loafs on the counter in cat thought. I stand beside her and space out, the two of us keeping each other company.

All is calm, all is sunlight reflected brilliantly off the beautiful, cold nature slumbering in a half-sleep drowsiness outside.

Frankie and I, in each other’s company, silently existing one for the other in nameless ways while the house sleeps. She and I watchful, guarding, alert, and openhearted to the being and becoming oneself.

A half hour passes in this manner. Frankie moves softly then, leaping down to the floor and off to her crow’s nest to snooze once more. I remain, watching the day change slowly into the muted orange glow of sunset followed by the bluish gray shadows of twilight. The dough has risen, and it is time to make tonight’s nourishment.

An inspiration strikes me and I decide to try something new with the Pizza of Doom recipe. I’m pleased because I know I’m making just enough, no more. As I roll out the dough, my brain buzzes with troubles “I should” be worried about, but they melt in contact with how I’m floating through my dreamy, alert witnessing.

The pizza comes perilously close to melting down like a reactor. I lack panic; I adjust the oven and let it ease down gently, until it comes out complete and delicious. I sense that K is hungry and ready to wake, so I stir her with a mere touch.

She grabs a slice and starts surfing the net as if she’s always done this. One by one the cats activate, going for their bowls of food. They eat small amounts and are remarkably polite with each other. I chomp down on a slice and savor the experience.

All is well.

While mayhem in my psyche ensues, I hang the portrait of My Mirage on a nearby wall.  The first sign of life in the house.  I think about being zero for two in my attempts to be successful with My Mirage and UFO Girl.  Maybe I was really two for zero.  Numerologically, twenty is related to the Judgment card in the tarot deck.  Not unlike how I’m feeling with a strange and unexpected dawn.

My thoughts turn to K.  If I’m going to have to cowboy up and be the horror host, she’ll have to be the hostess.  We need to get this haunted house in order!  We decide it’s time to blast away all these beams and blocks cluttering up the place.  Hard work stirring up dust and moving debris out of the way to go out for the Hek-yeah Disposal Team on night-time pickup.  There’s stuff I have in mind for a giveaway too.  The time has come for clearing out the mental space.

I head into the attic of my mind and go through some things, taking inventory on what will be a good start on a new year’s clearing out.  Some things will be put away again in proper order, while others will be brought out and handled.  Such is the tyranny of objects.

What I find are a host of treasures left behind in a psychic space so visibly tiny you could hardly see it.  There’s a room in my haunted house that defies the model of physics, working by the principles of trans-dimensional engineering.  Can it be that My Mirage has been like a western dragon, collecting rare things of which he cannot use and hoarding them without understanding?

I take up an old audio tape, a promo copy given to me by a radio gal I knew named Kate from a while back.  A selection of songs by a heavy metal band named Kryst The Conqueror, taken from their Deliver Us From Evil album.  I pop it into my player and listen to a series of epic songs from the days of headbanging long hair.  One thing heavy metal was good at was metaphors for the ordeals of love and the struggle against darkness.  The lyrics from In God We Trust come back to me from the depths of time:

For we have seen the face of hell and still believe
That the sword to kill the beast he’s given me
So how many more must die that one may see

I’m listening this time.  My soul returns back to when I was living that dark confusion and raw enthusiasm for understanding through heavy metal questing.  I remember the trauma of being wounded by the forces of damnation, an injury that went as deep and fatal as I had ever experienced.  My enemy, myself lost and gone bad in ways I never would have imagined or wanted.

I notice a plain, hastily scribbled letter from a dear friend in 1995.  I remember reading this but not understanding the words.  I was hearing the words in the songs I enjoyed without listening.  I read words in letters by important people in my life without paying attention.  When you’ve lost your way in the sickness of your own unlighted ordeal, so much is wasted.

SNACK!

Words matter.  They give form to ideas in our thoughts which lead to tangible things.  Words can destroy and they can build.  A single word from a troubled soul can rob you worse than any thief.  A single question, spoken from a humble soul can heal the wasteland and restore an ailing king.

“You will always be the first person I fell in love with.”

Just like that, a self-inflicted wound I had resigned myself to bearing the rest of my life, a horrible black void of failure that had stolen the best parts of me – crippled me, is healed.

The very words I’d needed most to hear had been glossed over blindly.  Then, the day I’m in smolder-mode over doom and doing post-Mirage work, I see and hear the words that close up maybe the biggest hole in my life.  I never expected the caring I gave away without thought to return to me with such power.

The Hana Valley in my heart is restored and a huge, huge core part of me is made whole again.  I can move forward, alive once more.  Welcome to the next level.

Wounds can heal in the darkest nights and hauntingest of houses.

Thanks Yoshie Izumi & Little Yo, for the Okami hookup, and for the message about caring.

I pick up the pen and do the picture mentioned in the previous post.  Think of it as pulling away the cobwebs, prying loose the boards, and digging out the sludge.  Yuck, this is gross.  There’s a lot of butt-gut material here.

Thoroughly nastified by the experience, creaking walls making me nervous the whole structure is going to come down any moment, I make my way down into the foundations.  Before I know it, I’m crawling around in the mud for who knows what.

That’s when I find the one-woman flying saucer in the crud.  I scrape away the detritus and uncover the saucer bit by bit.  It’s a nameless, inexplicable thing not unlike a chocolate éclair.  The ship is as light as a feather.  It looks like it should weigh about a two thousand pounds, but I lift it out of the gunk and onto the floorboards like I would pick up a plastic, hand-sized toy.

The saucer opens, and I understand this is because I’ve been exposed to UFO Girl’s cooties.  I am contaminated correctly.  I scoot myself inside and the marvelous contraption closes around me like a puzzle.  The fuel meter reads full.  I touch the diode with my hand and the fiery spirit inside sneezes out of me in an instant.  I watch the dial go down to zero.

EMPTY POWER RESTORED.

I turn on the radio diode, and hear all sorts of rockin’ tunes that imprint themselves on my reptile baseline.  I realize I’m taking this all in calmly so I don’t poop my pants.  I’m only using the most primitive of functions on this saucer.  Good luck on the intermediate stuff.

The saucer ejects me faster than Bond shooting out a Goldfinger agent from his Aston Martin.  I never thought that would ever happen to me!  There’s a terrific knocking at the doors.  I scramble up the stairs and answer the knocking.  The doors open easily.

UFO Girl is there.  She’s been waiting for me too.  Behind her is a huge throng of life-no-life-unlife forms assembled, looking for shelter.  I remember a previous vision and decide it’s time to let ’em all in.

Before I know it, the place is hopping like mad with more strange activity in my head than I know what to do with.

In her inexplicable way, UFO Girl thanks me for finding her saucer.  She’s amazed I gassed down the tank without getting myself totally killed.  Her material form has been stuck on this savage planet for too long.  It was driving her crazy.  She beeps and twirts, and the saucer comes hoverin’ out of the basement to land beside her.

UFO Girl boards the flying saucer and gets ready to depart.  She says I should really appreciate that Dark Goddess, because she’s one in a million.  Knows how to treat an alien lunatic on a transubstantiation binge.

I’m like, wait, what about that trip on your saucer earlier?  She raspberries that one.  It was all an illusion using advanced technology on my ape’s brain.  Humans think they’re so smart.  She’s glad she met a real moron finally.

Hey!

I suddenly realize I’m in for another goodbye.  UFO Girl is taking off, and she’s not coming back to this neck of the woods for a million years.  Something about her subscription to lifeform events.  I really like UFO Girl.  She’s so weird!  I just got to know her and now voom.

VOOM.

No last words.  That isn’t her style.  I’m spinning out of control.  Zero for two, and now that’s it.  I think about my crazy friend Alexi, and his words comfort me: “No worries, just fun.”  My whacky-wise Aquarian buddy, I think those words are truth.  I’m going to let the mystery of UFO Girl be.

The End?

Outside, there’s a crazy party of activity going on.  Every conceivable creature is out here.  There are monsters, spirits, really weird beings, strangers, aliens, victims, and mad scientists.  I haven’t the wherewithal to deal with that right this moment.  One thing at a time.

Naturally, I walk through the door and into the unknown.  The doors creak closed behind me.  Trapped like a rat!  My Mirage has been waiting for me to reach this point in our dialogue.  I thought I was dealing with my shadow, and perhaps I am a little.  Now, I’m not so sure.  He’s the dark king of the underworld waiting for me to arrive, and it’s turning me for a loop how this has turned out.

I’m awake and now the nightmare must end.  The clarion calls of the dawn are calling me so very fudging hard.  The night in the haunted house is over, in the deep me of me.  My Mirage is there before me in this large, empty house with nothing in it but him.  He is ready for this moment, preparing for it for years.

I can hardly believe how empty the place is.  It’s not what I expected at all.  Zippo.  The whole place looks ready to crumble.  He tells me things I can hardly hear because there’s this din in my mind’s ear.  I liked having a Mirage that was scary and cool.  He reassures me and says this is how it happens.  One day you’re done, and you have to let go.

I’m told everything has been accounted for, and transferred to me for the duration (of what?).  Okay, whatever.  So what do I do now?  How do I slay myself?

He says I slew him years ago.  This is only a recording.  His last request is that I draw a picture and reflect fondly on him now and then.  I’ve been afraid of myself, talking to myself all along.  It was all a shadow of the imagination that has passed in the night.  Oh god how I miss him already, a hole in my heart the size of a person who no longer is.

Good Lord, Count Gore De Vol is a prophet.  The end of Captain 20’s ship, the last night party of Creature Feature.  Channel 20 is canceled all over again, and now it’s just me, with no super creature horror filler hour anymore.  I’ve got to be my own horror host from now on; no one will do it for me.

I understand.  I’ve heard those words before from someone else.  “I am not coming back.  It’s up to you now.”

That’s when I notice the pen on the floor.  There’s the door to the basement, courtesy of revelations from my old friend Craig, who helped me interpret a dream once.  All I got to do is pry the boards loose and start digging through the stale poop.

But first, that picture.  Rest in peace, hero.

My 1.2 Kohinoor Rapidograph has been giving me the most awful of times this last week. No matter how much I soaked it, the inner mechanism wouldn’t do the magic click. Jammed with dry ink. It’s the largest line in my collection, and absolutely essential at getting thick, dark lines. My 0.8 and 0.6 were a little stuck, but I eventually managed to get them to make the magic click.

But man, my 1.2 was just breaking my heart. The ink crumbs started coming out yesterday, and I was able to shake the others loose. Huge flakes, small grains, and even thick lines of ink like pencil lead came out in the wash. Then all of a sudden, clickity clickity. Oh, music to my ears.

That’s the lot. I’m ready to start inking again. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Sakura Gelly Roll pens. I’ll be using them on the Holiday Cards to excellent effect over the next few days. But they can’t handle the posterboard or thick sheets of paper I like to use, and they don’t hold the watercolors well at all.

The Incorrigible Witch lent me two of her fabulous artistic creations. I feel like Baba Yaga lent me two of her spellbooks, just for laughs. Who knows what I’ll come away with by studying them. Meditating on context and illuminations right out of the human pit of existence? Who can tell, but I’m excited.

UFO Girl, with her strange ways, tricked me into signing up for one of those privacy-invading, application overloading, social network sites. All of a sudden, life form readings from out of the past start swarming around me. A thousand stories come flooding back to me from the deep, dark depths where I had buried them long ago before I went mad.

Talk about ghosts, and digging up graves to see what’s moldering inside—after all these years. Setting free spirits imprisoned by the past?

My friend Xtine came back into my life from another galaxy, where she had been collecting intergalactic buddha samples for the delight, horror and education of the general public. Her appearance has pried loose stones from a sepulture I’d thought long buried. It’s as if the dead are dancing out of their graves and I’m in my coffin asleep, trapped, lifeless.

I believe she’s another message, another mirror, shouting at my being with the serious credibility of an angelic trumpet. Judgement Day. Awaken. The angel is blowing the horn with the announcement power of a new life, a new calling.

I try to curl over on my side, go back to sleep. But it’s no use. I mean, It’s been written in the script of my name that one day I would be called like this, I knew it. For decades. But I just didn’t get it, and now I’m starting to realize that.

The other people weren’t dead either. I only felt disconnected. The fierce passion and connection to life they’ve made me feel hasn’t gone away. It lay dormant. Now Xtine’s prying loose stones, and the light of the stars and moon are pouring in like gangbusters. I’m fooling myself if I think I can escape.

Not everything about my old friends is what I like. Some of them surprise me with what they’ve been through, the amazing adventures they’ve had. Others are the same as they ever were, maybe a little more grizzled around the edges. It’s all good. What shocks me though, is how much feeling I have for them, it overwhelms me. The light shining behind them is beyond my comprehension.

Then I start mixing in the new friends. My current life, and boy does that stir the pot. I had dreams about this. I have piles of papers with clues about it. But the day comes and you just aren’t prepared. The bodies leaping up out of the graves, the ghosts floating and flying about, that’s me. The reconnection is another message staring me in the face. People are in my life again, reminding me of the parts of me I’d forgotten. I wasn’t dead, but I haven’t exactly been alive either.

My spirit’s been traveling a long labyrinth back to myself, and now there’s a great din and a call to action. I rise up out of my coffin and push aside the stones to look around.

I’m at the haunted house, and everybody’s in the place.

This weekend I gathered together my disparate containers of tools and spread them out before me.  I meditated on what was before me and considered how little I’ve paid attention to my instruments of illustration.  In my mind, I imagined a fantasy of tearing down the old house and pulling out all the old roots.  I experienced feelings akin to shattering the foundations with TNT while my heart shook from the destruction.  The courage to go through with this comes from seeing other artists doing their work.  Their magnificent work strengthens my resolve.  My inside soundtrack keeps repeating, “Everybody is in the place, everybody is in the place.”

I removed all the junk or tools that no longer serve my purpose.  I threw out some of it.  Others I put away.  All my rubber stamps will have to go in a box with my sticker-stash and mail envelope magic materials.  That project I’ll be returning to.  It’s still forming.  I looked at how low my watercolor and colored pencil collection had gotten.  My marker collection is a joke, I haven’t been serious for twenty years.  The Kohinoor pens have seen better days, and now they’re all jammed with dried ink.  Most of my brushes haven’t been cleaned or checked in years.  My poster board and paper assortment is sub-par and all over the place.  I hardly know what I have.

If I look at myself honestly, this part of my skill is in bad shape.  I’ve been coasting, getting by with abilities from a place in my life that expired a long time ago.  I sit down and get to work.  I make a list of things I need to get.  The pens receive a revivifying soak and creak back to life again, slowly, with much coaxing.  The paper and board get organized, and I cut pieces down or arrange them according to where I think my need is pointing.  My toolbox, which is the nexus of what I use when it’s time for heavy duty work, gets a makeover.  New good luck charms end up in the holding tray.  I’m not riding by the skin of my teeth anymore.  I mean business, the new organization satisfies for now.

K and I head to the Michaels store.  She finds a number of pleasant, cheap goodies to advance her need to be creative.  I find most everything I’m looking for, but it’s hard work.  I don’t have immediate access to a good starbase with everything like I used to.  That’s okay, I’ll make do until I can “plus” my collection forward to where I want to be.  The critical pencils I need I find.  It’s good to have a fresh set of Verthins between the fingers again.  I heat my electric sharpener up so much getting them all ready, I have to take a break.  Things are heating up psychologically I think, and I laugh.  My friends, the people who support and encourage me are at my back in a way I can’t describe.  The new stuff gets put in the toolbox along with the still-relevant old stuff.  I feel like reinforcements are here.  Erasers, fine and heavy blades to cut and scrape the material, and a new brush for heavy saturation.

I get down to working on my cover design, doing preliminary sketches and filling them in.  I cut a line of boards and set them up for several attack runs at drawing practice, all to the measurements I’ll be needing.  I paint more messages from the unconscious and make adjustments to several works-in-progress.  It’s all tightly organized, and I move from one dance to the next, switching tools back and forth.  Before I know it, the old gun-shy jitters are breaking up and turning fluid.  Lots more work to do, and my skill wakes like it’s been in a coma.  The therapy will be tremendous, but I surprise myself as a flourish of line or perspective shines through the cracks.

Something a friend told me back in 1996 comes out of the depths of time to my memory.  “How’s your comic doing?”  I mouth the words to myself, “Nowhere, it’s dead.”  Her response:  “Dreams don’t die.”  Which also happens to be the title of a movie I saw once, about a graffiti artist who leaves the streets behind to become a successful graphic artist by the skin of his teeth.

Another friend says a week ago in so many words, “Hey, what’s that creaking sound?”  I’m reminded of a line from Fruits Basket – “What’s that sound?  It’s the sound of something about to break.”  In Fruits Basket the line refers to a curse and a thousand years of misery coming to an end for real, because it’s already been over for years.  My friend points (in her special way of conversation) to a mailbox inside my psyche filled to bursting with letters, the same message over and over again.

“What’s the use?” I say to myself.  “I wasn’t…worthy.  And I don’t care much for Harry Potter anyway.”  Then the mailbox bursts, and I’m swimming in letters that all say the same thing:  “Try again.”  Another song cues in my inner soundtrack from The Verve:  “You can do anything you want to, all you gotta do is try.”

So yeah 1996 friend.  I was the one that was nowhere, dead asleep from a nightmare that never seemed to end.  I’m waking up and finding out the comic was just a part of what I’m supposed to do.  I didn’t have enough vision yet to see that.

UFO Girl whispers into my inner listening:  Soon you’ll be ready to walk in the center of the saucer.

Flash back to my recent trip to Michaels with K.  The check-out woman at Michaels looks at the materials I’m getting, many of which are a buck.  She makes a comment about how I’m buying everything on the dollar menu.  I’m floored, because she’s referencing my current short duration personal savior.  That guy takes something small and makes it into a story filled with fun.  Yeah, I’m trying to be creative and filled with joy about something that’s my personal insight.  We chat for a while, while K chuckles to herself.  I say I wish I was that creative.  The woman runs my pencil refreshment pack through the checker, looks at them, and says, “You are.”

The external encounter is like I’m getting another flood of letters.  Mirrors and mirrors and mirrors again in my life, and I can hardly stand the shock to my small vision of who I am.  My fear of being struck down for growing to fill the form I inhabit roars loud and hard like a song.

UFO Girl whispers again into my inner listening:  Soon your music quest will find your soundtrack.

I’m listening and readying my instruments for writing and drawing.

I would say living in a haunted house and unable to leave counts as being “up a tree”.  The adventure clues seem to point to a need to go further than ‘spending a night in a haunted house’.  It’s almost like a mystery play, with the experience akin to spending a night in the woods to prove your readiness to become an adult.

But to go beyond the transformative journey implies something else.  I’m thinking of a role as a mediator between the two worlds.  I’m feeling there’s more to it than that.  There isn’t just the shaman or the chief who tells the tribe how to live in harmony with the supernatural.  There’s the fighter who takes decisive action, and the artist who manifests joy.

And there is the idiot who doesn’t belong anywhere.  Who roams to and fro as they please.  Many times the fool is a victim, or a stranger who is not appreciated or wanted.  The dunderhead makes mistakes and messes up despite the best of intentions.

Out of nowhere, I think of Punch.  The beak-nosed, hunchbacked, slapstick fellow from Punch and Judy shows.  I start looking up this character, and it’s as if I’m discovering a part of myself that has been sitting in an attic waiting for me.

For those not in the know, Punch is a character in a puppet show that originated (as far as is known) in Italy, took root in England and became an institution, and was very popular in the states at one time.  The show goes up and down in popularity and goes through changes according to the times.

The show consists of a puppeteer who stands inside a tall, portable, makeshift stage.  The puppeteer manipulates the puppets to tell various aspects of Punch’s story while soliciting responses from the audience.  The show is performed for both kids and adults, with the tone of the show depending on the mood of the puppeteer and the audience.

The puppeteer, called a “professor”, uses a secret technique to give Punch a distinct voice.  Punch is a violent, loathsome fellow who goes about smacking the other characters of the show on the head with a big stick.  Usually to the line of “that’s the way you do it.”  The various characters can include:

• Judy:  Punch’s wife.  Thus, the show is called “Punch and Judy”.
• The Baby:  Punch’s infant with Judy.
• The Policeman:  Tries to arrest Punch for his crimes.
• The Alligator:  Tries to eat Punch.
• Pretty Polly:  Attractive woman Punch tries to get on with.
• The Ghost:  Tries to scare Punch.
• The Doctor:  Tries to cure Punch of his ills.
• The Hangman:  Tries to hang Punch for his crimes.
• The Devil:  Tries to make Punch pay for his crimes.

The show can be quite vulgar, and it can also be goofy fun, depending on how the professor plays it.  I’ve never been one for puppets, but the whole world of Punch seems so darn interesting, it draws me in with the temptation to take it up for myself.

The slapstick (a stick that makes a slap sound when it hits someone) Punch uses to do the other characters in comes forward in my mind.  That must be the arcane stick I was seeing earlier.  There are some schools of thought that Punch is descended from a mystery play from ancient times, and that his story represents moral lessons and catharsis of an incredibly civilized kind.  So it makes sense that the Hek-mail was trying to get that across in a mystical, magical sort of way.

In a psychic sense, the slapstick must be the tool I’ll need to help the monsters.  And it might be what I need to delve into the haunted house.  Of course, it’s Mr. Punch’s slapstick and not mine, and coaxing him into letting me borrow it might prove interesting.  Well, as long as the audience gets a laugh out of it, I suppose it’s all good.

This could get real weird.

No luck trying to unlock the sealed envelope at the base of my brain stem.  So I contemplate how the crummy CDs I mentioned earlier have turned out to be total busts.  4 CDs and not one good song for me.  I know it’s a clue, but if I got nothing out of it, then what?

Except there’s one song I remember hearing had a funky beat.  Space Woman by Charlie, which I listen to again.  This time, it stands out.

I’m a spacer woman, don’t you worry ’bout me
I don’t want to hurt you, I just want to love you

Whoa, that’s got to be from UFO Girl for sure.  Turns out the song is from 1983, and is called “Spacer Woman”.  It was a popular tune in Italian Discos.  Weird.  I wonder why UFO Girl has changed her tune, and if the lyrics are meant for me, or my Mirage.  Then again, it could be one of those “We come in peace, shoot to kill, shoot to kill” things.  I guess I’ll have to go and find out!

Then I run into She music by way of a livejournal buddy.  I get my hands on several downloadable albums of electronica music galore, and it’s all good.  Well crumbs, looks like UFO Girl is hooking me up after all with the sweet life support tunes.  I was getting worried there.  A kernel of Royal Road Guidance in the malefic.

I get the feeling that UFO Girl can help with the Hekate Headquarters mail, and that I ought to let my Mirage know of her lyrics.  I figure writing a message and leaving it downstairs in the basement will probably work, except I think my Mirage has got me under batwing surveillance now like nobody’s business, just like that boy in Karin the vampire.

That probably means UFO Girl’s got my place bugged with high tech gadgets, or heck she probably has my coordinates memorized and she can dial a direct sensor reading whenever she feels like.  Soon as I think of that, she comes out over a hidden Mr. Megaphone loudspeaker and tells me she’ll decode my Hek-mail if I’ll run an errand for her.

Sheesh, everybody wants something!

I get the feeling if I don’t my music quest will run into a long string of bad no-hits.  At the very least she’ll turn my draft cider into Skid Mark Hooch, and that stuff’s only fit for Plan 9 automatons.

My skull’s innards get a flash image of a bionic alien critter with steel coil springs for legs and a tail, a pincer for a mouth, and an appetite for bamboo shoots.  Apparently, this critter escaped the saucer again, and I have to find it before it attaches its wheel to a human being and starts manufacturing intelligent cotton balls.  The critter’s name is Nine, and while he’s been de-venomed and immunized against human stupidity, his 5715 interface has yet to be adjusted to “neutral”, thus the threat of cotton ball civilization.

Alien critters get lost on this planet all the time.

I drive over to the neighborhood she believes the critter probably landed, something about really digging the vibes there.  It’s chilly, windy, and dark, with shady characters walking around.  I walk up and down the paths, crunching leaves underfoot.  At one point I nearly twist my ankle in the dark. I have no luck finding Nine, and am forced to return to my car in defeat.

Crumbs, I’m zero for two with these weird imaginary characters.